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Monday, October 6, 2014

Joseph O'Neill's new novel, The Dog, is a strange little piece of fiction — it's about an unnamed mid-30s lawyer who, having just participated in a spectacularly messy break-up with his girlfriend of nine years, moves to Dubai to take a job with a family conglomerate that may or may not be totally on the level. But the real story on this novel is its dense, ultra-logical (dude's a lawyer, after all), digression (and parenthesis)-laden prose. It's a style you're going to either love or hate. I loved it, much as I did O'Neill's previous novel Netherland. (I remember thinking after reading that novel that O'Neill reminded me of an Irish Philip Roth. In this novel, he's closer to an Irish David Foster Wallace.)

The story itself, which takes place in 2011, is largely portrait of Dubai — and its massive contradictions. For instance, Dubai is a place of ridiculous wealth and excess (even as it's still reeling from the effects of the financial crash), but it's still ruled by strict religious law. Dubai is a fascinating place, and O'Neill, through his narrator, delights in pointing out all its foibles and its hypocrisy — often at length.

Our narrator actually spends most of his days sending emails (both real, and hilariously, in his mind) to his employers, trying to cover his own ass in case what the rich sons who run the conglomeration of companies are up to isn't exactly legal. Sometimes he has to book Bryan Adam's for one of the guy's wife's birthday. Sometimes he teaches the guy's spoiled 15-year-old son how to do Sudoku. Sometimes, he visits prostitutes — and then spends pages justifying this splurge.

There's a mystery here, too — what happened to a guy who lives in building who it's discovered has a secret Dubai wife (in addition to his other wife back in Chicago)? Has he run away with Wife No. 2, or has some other more sinister fate befallen him?

Again, despite the fact that this novel made the Booker Prize Long List, it's probably not a novel most readers will enjoy (and given its meager 3.3 rating on GoodReads, most readers clearly haven't). But I dug it — I liked how O'Neill could use these ridiculous hundred-word sentences that would include five parentheticals, and tease out an argument about something as relatively mundane as porn. If you liked DFW's essay on whether lobsters can feel pain, you may like this novel, too.

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And then, on the opposite end the spectrum prose-style-wise: Terry Hayes' impossibly long thriller I Am Pilgrim. This novel was recommended to me earlier this summer by a bookseller at a Maui Barnes and Noble when I stopped in to pick up Stephen King's new novel, Mr. Mercedes. So I was excited about it, both because it recalled when I was in Maui, and also because any comparison to King deserves at least a glance.

The verdict? It's a decent plane read, but it's definitely a turn-off-your-brain-and-suspend-disbelief-and-overlook-silly-coincidences-type novel. The story is about a secret agent who we see in the first scene investigating a mysterious murder — the killer apparently used tactics spelled out in our hero's book of investigation techniques penned before going into hiding. This really bugs him. Then there's a radicalized Muslim who wants to destroy America. There's another mysterious murder in the Turkish resort town of Bodrum. And so our hero — Pilgrim, eventually — has to race against time to solve murders and save the world from terrorism.

Again, it's just okay. Clocking in at well over 600 pages, it actually seems longer than that. Many of the subplots and much of the background information Hayes gives could be easily condensed or cut altogether.

I thought that the pacing of I am Pilgrim was decent, given the complexity of the plot. However, the continuous Islamophobia/Arab-hating ruined it for me. Devout Muslims (the non-terrorist kind) are cast as kooks. In one instance, the narrator interrupts the story of his super-spy adventures to tell us that Mohammed is in the top ten boys' names in Belgium. It's framed like it's a scary thing. The narrator returns several times to the story of the Nazis and the Jews, saying that the Jews have learned that if someone says they want to kill them, to take that person seriously. It felt like he was casting us (the Western world) in the Jew role, but it felt like he had more in common with the other party that wanted to wipe everyone of a certain background off the earth. It's too bad, because otherwise it was a well-plotted if ridiculous thriller.